"More justification for anti trust action against Google."
Antitrust is the RICO of HN, as far as i can tell.
"They have absolutely no right to encroach on that, and they know it."
Based on what, exactly? Other than your assertion, can you actually cite any cases/law that says this?
Most caselaw i'm aware of says the exact opposite - they can in fact control it, legally.
At a very base level, it's a derivative work - they have the literal right to decide which derivative works they approve of and don't.
Caselaw has been clear on this since the days of duke nukem levels.
Heck, even time-shifting (IE not even changing the content or presentation) only survives under fair use - it is otherwise a copyright violation. Courts really haven't accepted presentation or content changes except when being done for parody or satire reasons, and are very careful not to destroy the derivative work and public performance rights.
Courts are in fact, much more accepting of very transformative use than this kind of use.
You may not like this - I don't actually like it, mind you, but that's different from "are they within their rights".
I assume next you will discover you also can't just take signals going through the air around you (satellite TV, cellular, etc) and just do whatever you want with them either.
> Antitrust is the RICO of HN, as far as i can tell.
Not sure what you mean. But I’ll be specific - big companies are abusive because they have too much capital, too many resources (like legal teams), too much protection from competition - basically too much power. YouTube would not need to be the only place for online video content except that it benefits from network effects (creators and users are stuck), bundling (with Google’s ad business), and other anti competitive aspects. I’m sure you can construct the antitrust arguments against the iOS-Android duopoly trivially as well.
So yes, the need for fairness and competition is plenty of justification for antitrust action against Google (and Apple and Amazon and Microsoft). I hope that takes the form of new legislation to make it much easier to do something to fix these problems, unlike current antitrust law which just results in performative lawsuits that drag out for years only to result in a minor fine that achieves nothing.
> Based on what, exactly? Other than your assertion, can you actually cite any cases/law that says this?
I said they have no right in the casual sense, which has a broader meaning to most people. It’s obvious they shouldn’t have a right to control what you do client side. I don’t care what the law says, or what the technicalities are. There’s absolutely no reason to limit discourse on HN, or the outrage this deserves, to only what the law currently is.
> At a very base level, it's a derivative work - they have the literal right to decide which derivative works they approve of and don't.
Is me tuning the color balance on my TV a “derivative work”? Obviously changing client side code is not a derivative work.
> I assume next you will discover you also can't just take signals going through the air around you (satellite TV, cellular, etc) and just do whatever you want with them either.
Why not? I’m allowed to collect information from the air and do whatever I want with it, since it is just data, which I’m allowed to record in public spaces, and data is speech.
"I said they have no right in the casual sense, which has a broader meaning to most people."
So you said it's a antitrust violation in the casual sense?
Whatever that means?
This is some interesting doubling down i guess.
As for the rest, i suggest you go learn a little about the law, despite your flip-flopping about whether you are complaining about the law or the "casual sense"
" Obviously changing client side code is not a derivative work."
You keep using this phrase obviously, as if it makes your argument for you. It does not. You still have not made a single cogent argument here, whether we are talking about the current or whyanything should change.
"Why not? I’m allowed to collect information from the air and do whatever I want with it, since it is just data, which I’m allowed to record in public spaces, and data is speech"
Lots of legal assertions in here, can you disambiguate for me which are just "casual"?
Third party clients that exist solely to display a certain site in a slightly different way are definitely derivative works of that site. That's not really an "if" question. I'm not aware of any disagreement by any court on this front, but feel free to cite cases if you've got them.
This was even settled back in the days of iframing/etc.
As for the rest, it turns out this particular argument has also already played out many times and reached what appears to be a fixed point - there is actually lots of caselaw on the snippets they use and how far they can/can't go, and for what purposes, before they would have to license them.
This is also, to be quite honest, not a great legal argument. It helps a lot to realize the law is not logical, it just is. Particularly when it comes to copyright, which is a very weird bundle of rights applied in sometimes very specific and odd ways to different mediums.
Things like copyright and how it applies end up very much the sum of the n thousand cases that apply it.
While sometimes you get principles out of appeals courts or the supreme court, it's relatively rare in the scheme of things (IE happens once every 10000 cases or whatever), and it's even more rare that you get generally applicable principles that you can easily apply to a new situation.
This is very different than lots of other areas of law.
Some of this is an artifact of the fact that current copyright law was still mostly built for literary works and music, and concepts don't always have an easy/obvious translation to other kinds of works (so it took hundreds of cases for courts to reach a fixed point)
Putting ethical concerns aside (I'm definitely not on Big Tech's side on this), it just makes business sense to not piss off one of your biggest app developers in favor of someone making an unofficial client.
We absolutely need more regulation for these big platforms, but until then it's difficult to blame Apple for acting rationally business-wise.
Why do I need permission from my city council to build a bakery in a residential neighborhood? I shouldn't need it, it's all red tape like Apple's policies.
My analogy is poor but we're arguing for the same thing. Apple's App Store policies are arbitrary red tape¹ and we should be able to choose different stores.
It’s a fair question IMO. The YouTube APIs presumable come with “terms of service” for use, or some such. What exactly, legally speaking, can they specify? Can it be enforced (by Google lawyers and courts) to the point where Apple would be compelled to do things to force users to comply, like removing this App?
I think the answer _should_ be no, but that’s different to asking what is your actual rights on your device vs their “right” to control use of their system.
He isn't even using YouTube's APIs. From the dev himself:
> I’ve said from the initial launch, Juno is built as a web-wrapper for YouTube, akin to a browser extension, and purposefully built with full respect for the YouTube website and experience, and as a result does not block ads in any capacity, nor does it introduce extra functionality like downloading videos offline that could facilitate that. Further, Juno doesn’t even use any YouTube APIs, as it has no need to: it just wraps the website, and uses CSS and JavaScript to style the website and functionality more in line with visionOS. This is in contrast to other third-party tools that for instance scrape the YouTube website for applicable video URLs and use those directly, or those that integrate ad-blocking functionality.
If you separate out "how should things be" from "how things are", then from duke-nukem levels to you name it, caselaw is very clear that they can control this through fairly simple copyright law principles (derivative works, etc), without even having to resort to more complex theories.
Your best argument is fair use, but it's not a particularly good fair use argument in this case.
This isn't even a close case.
Your only secondary argument is antitrust but it seems like a really weak one in this case as well.
Not that you're under any obligation to suffer the peanut gallery, but I'm curious as to how it is that Micro Star v. FormGen (which I assume is your Duke Nukem reference) obviously applies more readily here than Galoob v. Nintendo and Sega v. Accolade. As far as I can tell, the key distinctions are in how permanent the derivative works are and to what extent the erstwhile infringement is forced by the platform owner as a condition of interoperability, which seem like they're debatable questions for third-party client apps.
Granted, maybe the DMCA makes these distinctions practically moot because a service can get away with just applying arbitrary restrictions via a "technological measure" now.
(too lazy to look up the resolution, but thought you might find it amusing)
So this is a totally reasonable question/debate to have.
I'll mix practical and academic views, but happy to discuss more of one or the other in detail.
The first answer I can give you is single-purpose apps/things have faired quite poorly in the copyright realm, any principled caselaw/etc aside. It just turns out to be really hard to convince a judge/jury (to the degree there are any fact specific questions) that an app you made with a specific purpose of displaying someone else's content, whose entire value is in displaying that content, is not a derived work of that content. It fits fairly squarely in the definition: "A “derivative work” is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, .... [in] any other form in which a work may be recast".
But even to the degree it doesn't end up a derivative work, it almost certainly ends up a distribution or reproduction or public performance the other work. So as a defense attorney trying to defend it, you have a pretty hard non-infringement argument simply because you have to simultaneously argue "it's not a derivative work, it's not a distribution, it's not a reproduction, it's not a public performance"
The line does get fuzzy somewhere, obviously - but one thing to keep in mind on that front is that derivative works are not like a single-parent-only structure. Something can be a derivative work of multiple works simultaneously :)
They usually are. This app is a derivative work of apple's libraries/frameworks, LLVM libraries or whatever it was compiled with, etc.
I also expect you'd agree that if someone copied the HTML/etc of youtube's website into the app and shipped it directly, it would a derivative work of that too. That is a clear transformation/adaption of an existing work.
So what's the practical difference here? That it's dynamically loaded and then modified? that seems like a hard place to hang your hat :)
Now mind you, i've actually made this argument before in the LGPL context, so i have taken both sides before depending on the facts/complexities :)
As an example, if i make a book, and there is no text on the pages, instead each page says something like "for the text of this page, please see characters <x>-<y> of page <a>-<b> of book <c>-<d>, ISBN number <e>", is my book a derivative work of the works it references?
it has no text or content on its own, and is only incorporating by reference.
There are reasonable arguments on both sides.
All that said, the practical line that gets drawn, for better/worse, is often around usually who is the agent/controller, and what dependencies exist.
IE it usually end up like this:
Me loading HN in a normal web browser - i'm creating a derivative work of the HN site in my browser, on my display. The web browser, shipped alone, not a derivative work of HN.
Me using an HN app that downloaded all of HN and updates it once a week on its own - the app is a derivative work of HN, and it's creative derivative works of the content on a regular basis. i'm using/ browsing these derivative works.
Here we are somewhat in the middle, but given the entire point of the app, who is doing the loading/modification, and the actual modification of content/styling, i think it falls a lot more on the latter side than the former.
At least for derivative works.
These days, to you other point, it rarely gets to the question of derivative works at all due to TOS/DMCA enforcement. You don't have a right to access the content at all except to the degree you are licensed to, app or not. Rather than argue about derivation, they'll just sue you for unauthorized reproduction or distribution, since that is more clear.
The bigger problem here is Apple and the App Store. Google is run by user-hostile goons, but if there was a way to sideload apps on iOS/iPadOS/VisionOS/EIEIOS there’d still be a way for power users to use the app.
Case in point: I use FreeTube on all my computers, which works just fine regardless of what Apple or Google would prefer.
Google isn't great by any means, but at least Android OS (maintained by Google) lets you sideload apps all you want. So my TV running Android lets me sideload SmartTube so I can watch YouTube without ads.
The root problem here isn't Google, it's Apple. Of course Google wants you to view their horrible ads, and isn't going to make it extremely easy to avoid this (which is why SmartTube isn't available on the Play Store and must be sideloaded), but they're not the ones with the super-locked-down platform. If you want some kind of freedom, stop buying Apple junk.
In my opinion _both_ platforms are awful, for different reasons. Google spies on everything you do, and Apple has a smaller amount of spying but a very high-walled garden.
I've made the choice to hold my nose and continue to use an Apple device for my mobile phone, but I purposely do as little as I can on it and opt to use a general purpose computer as much as possible, where I can run whatever software I want. I have an iPad, but it's collecting dust in the corner, because anything I could do on it can be done better on my Thinkpad running linux or on my Macbook.
